System life. How to organize life to cope with uncertainty and achieve results without burnout

3. There are no problems. There are only situations and your attitude to them. For example, people don’t want to make you feel bad, they do everything to make them feel good. It turns out their «good» can be «bad» for you. Why do people quarrel? Because they have different views on the same situations. For one it is a problem, but for the other it is not. Of course, tragedies happen in life, and everything is pretty clear here. But time does not stop. You also need to be able to relate to them and experience them correctly. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a situation, and you have your own attitude to it. Animals have no consciousness and no problems. They are not able to give events such a characteristic as «problem». A crow on the branch is not sad that a raven does not approach her, and she is lonely. She doesn’t croak to everyone around that she has problems in her personal life. Only people call dissatisfaction with the situation or mismatch of expectations a problem. All the problems come from the fact that life has become too simple and safe. Now you don’t have to worry about being eaten by a lion or dying of cold in a cave. The brain is sharpened by evolution to search for risks and anxiety, but our life does not give it reasons. Therefore, the brain finds them in any situation, worries, and we call it problems. We avoid them and are afraid. Moreover, they so simply allow us to justify inaction or harmful decisions. Do not perceive problems as an evil force from the outside that prevents you from living. Replace the word «problem» with «undesirable situation» and make it a rule: «A task should be formulated from any undesirable situation.» Then solve it or use analysis to figure out why it can’t be done.

«Never explain with malicious intent

what can easily be explained by stupidity»

Hanlon’s Razor

Dependence on certainty can have very bad consequences. If everything is clear in advance, then what will be the motive to develop? When you become financially independent, you become more confident. The future begins to seem certain. This is especially dangerous for those who do not understand their true desires. For them, the comfort zone becomes a breeding ground for degradation. It will be everything, but it will be boring. Like in the joke about the new Russian, who called Christmas tree toys defective. Because they hung beautifully on the Christmas tree and did not, please him. When there is no uncertainty in achieving goals, ambitions gradually disappear. There are tribes of Indians who change their place of residence every two years. Thus, they give the soil a rest, and new locations require new skills and achievements from them to ensure their lives. They did not read books about self-development and did not undergo growth training. They noticed that there is a threat to development in the certainty and comfort zone. They realized that if a person does not learn to cope with difficulties, then he will break down at the first difficult situation, and such times will surely come in every person’s life.

Uncertainty is the beginning of everything new. A place where something happens. Your personal environment for new opportunities in which you grow and gain new experiences. If you do what you know, you don’t move forward. How can you get something new if you act in the old way? Everything new is a risk, and risk is the reverse side of new opportunities and changes. Don’t be afraid of uncertainty, it’s a part of life, and it won’t be any other way. Learn to enjoy uncertainty and notice that you will become happier. In short, you have no choice. Take the time to prepare to realize this and accept the uncertainty. You can wait for certainty and never start, constantly procrastinate and be afraid. Or you can take the first step and competently start moving forward, crushing the uncertainty. The main thing is to understand: while you are thinking, time is passing. It’s not waiting for you. Each of us has minus one day on the counter every day. It is in our best interests to solve it faster: stand still or do something, despite the uncertainty. I’m not saying it will be too late later. I say that you can start enjoying your life to the fullest earlier and do it longer.

Attitude to mistakes

Let’s suppose the previous paragraph gave you a dopamine boost. You imagined how boldly you begin to change your life in conditions of uncertainty. But then you are waiting for mistakes that will eat up dopamine, and therefore enthusiasm. They will certainly be. Even if the plan is ironclad, it is impossible to foresee everything. Any changes are a new experience, which is impossible without mistakes. When I moved to Moscow, the big surprise was the search for housing. We were so focused on the legal subtleties of an official stay and job search that we didn’t find out how the apartment was being rented. Suddenly we found out that if the monthly rent costs 30 thousand rubles, then you can’t just pay this amount and move in. You need to immediately pay 90 thousand rubles. Deposit 30 thousand rubles, for the first month 30 thousand rubles. and for the last 30 thousand rubles. You also need to pay the realtor. The risk that I did not foresee turned into an attraction called «Get out of your comfort zone for 2 weeks.» Negotiation skills, courage for a new one and tolerance for unpleasant work are immediately sharpened. For me, it became a lesson that you need to better analyze the subject area, and added a couple of points to the communication skill. No wonder Nietzsche said: everything that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. If you do something and there are no mistakes, then you are not doing anything new. You need to try to avoid mistakes, but if they happen, then take them as an asset. This is your valuable experience, your knowledge, which moves you to a higher level. Each new approach to the task you will already do with a new experience, and each time you will go further. Like Tom Cruise in the movie «The Edge of the Future». Any step into uncertainty is a mistake. But not any mistakes are growth. You grow when you make new mistakes. If you step on the same rake every time, then go back to the analysis. Look for the root cause and eliminate it so that you no longer step on the same rake. You should strive to step on a new rake, and not walk on the old ones.

Look at the experiment with clay pots. One group of people was given the task to make as many pots as possible. The second group was told to make perfect pots as perfect as possible. As a result, there were much more almost perfect pots in the first group than in the second. In general, the quality of the pots of the second group was worse than the first. People who didn’t bother, but just performed – achieved a better result much easier! And those who tried to do it perfectly, so that they would be highly appreciated, were in a state of stress and could not even do well. They were afraid of the result, not the action. It does not mean that you need to make as many thoughtless attempts as possible to get the perfect result. You need to grow with every mistake. And if you concentrate on the ideal, then there will always be a fear of making a mistake. Like an anchor that prevents you from starting to move. Allow yourself to make mistakes, love mistakes and don’t blame yourself for them.

«Disappointment is a crystal lens

Fate rewards her favorites with it

So, we are standing at the border

So, something new is already being done»

GROT

Instead of «I’ve made a mistake» think, «how interesting it’s turned out, now I know something new.» As Thomas Edison said, he did not suffer defeats, but simply found 10,000 ways that did not work. Look for people who have made mistakes and learn from their experience. Any experienced person has gained experience through mistakes. Not from books and stories, but from mistakes. You, too, will become experienced only in this way.

In my last job at a marketing agency, not all of my employees and contractors were cool. Almost every one of our projects was a series of disasters. Problems with clients, threats and conflicts. Endless machine-gun fire of project management errors. If you make a list of everything that happened there, you can collect a volume of harmful tips for the profession of a project manager. I wasted a lot of energy and nerves then. I couldn’t change jobs or go on vacation to find my meaning of life in Bali. I hated those mistakes and constant disassembly, because I didn’t know what value they would give in the future. Now I am grateful to that time. I have gained a lot of experience in such a short period of time as in five years of working in a normal agency. Every step towards the goal requires you to master new skills to overcome new challenges. Skills are formed only through experience. To get a new experience, you need to try to do something that you have not done before. Today I aim to get errors in hypothesis testing and any tasks as early as possible. To take the shortest route as soon as possible. I try to complete any step with a clear result which is achievement of the goal by error or correction.

During interviews with candidates for the role of project manager, we spend most of the discussion discussing failures. Having understood what kind of experience a person had and what mistakes he made, I understand what level his skills were, how they were formed, what kind of thinking he had, and how he treated mistakes. Now many have learned to tell what good fellows they are. But not everyone can admit their failures, tell how it happened, what were the reasons and conclusions. What can I say? Not everyone can admit their mistakes and accept criticism. While writing this chapter, my wife sent me a meme about the Russian language. The author was Polina Masalygina. Her linguistic blog gave me hope that our planet can still be saved. She is very cool and makes unusual useful content with a soul. Be sure to subscribe and like her. Immediately I got to the story, where Polina described that personal criticism is the best motivation to change something in life. She posted a video from her long-ago presentation, where, in her opinion, she performed very poorly in public. When she saw herself from the side, she wanted to delete her blog, became very ill and engaged in self-flagellation for a long time. It was one of the ways, but fortunately, today we see Polina’s blog. As she writes, now she is engaged in self-flagellation with knowledge. This is very subtly noticed and shows by a real example that you do not need to be afraid of your mistakes. We need to use them for development.

Therefore, after accepting uncertainty, tune in to the correct attitude to mistakes. Treat them as payment for movement on the uncertainty card. Don’t get upset and don’t be disappointed when something went wrong or didn’t work out the first time. Don’t let the fear of failure or the unknown keep you from moving forward. Only inaction can be ideal. Act, make decisions and take responsibility for them. Believe me, it’s better than standing still all your life and putting likes to those who are not afraid of mistakes to go ahead.

«The best thing to do when making a decision is to do the right thing. The second most effective thing is to do the wrong thing. But the worst thing is to do nothing»

Theodore Roosevelt

Formation of the target picture

After accepting the current realities, you can start planning. But you don’t need to start with a plan. It is always better to start with the formation of the target picture. Descriptions of the end point where you need to come. We know the current situation, the tasks that need to be solved and the vector of our desires. Often desires can be expressed by dreams or vague wishes. At this stage, the desires need to move from an abstract vision to a concrete one. To do this, you need to accept that «desires» and «dreams» are not equal to the goal. Dreams and desires are your fantasies about you and your life in the future. Fantasies make it difficult to focus on the current situation and use resources here and now. Between the dream and the goal, I suggest using the target picture. The target picture is the requirements for your future life and the requirements for yourself. It is needed to structure the dream. The goal is specific actions with deadlines, resources, risks and scenarios of events. Why do we need such a multi-pass as «dream – target picture – goal»? If you have not previously analyzed your motivation – and, accordingly, your desires either – then there is a risk that your thoughts are saturated with fragments of other people’s desires or blurred. Everyone around us owns a business, drives expensive cars, eats in restaurants, travels, builds relationships and is very happy. This is understandable and pleasant to us, we want it. Such things are very easy to desire. It’s easier than figuring out your life, planning goals and solving your problems. If you are asked what you dream about, then you will answer very easily and quickly: a lot of money, never work, a strong family, travel, a house by the sea and everything like that. If I ask you to describe your desired life: «How much money do you need? What will you do? What country should I live in? What will your house be like? How will you spend your time? And why do you need this?» – almost no one can answer it. Because imagining the future is a very difficult task. I want something successful and cool, like everyone else, but it’s not clear exactly what. What difference does it make now that it should be specific? When I have the money, everything will become clear right away, and we’ll figure it out there. Just take my annoying job away from me now, put a couple of million on the account and give me everything that can be posted online in order to be loved and envied by everyone. I often observe how people with such dreams try to take steps to their realization. They read books and take courses to set goals. There they are immediately thrown from abstraction into goal-setting tools. For example, SMART, MOSCOW and the like. Such tools imply that the goal should be clear and specific. But how can a person put down deadlines and specific steps if he himself does not know the details or does not know how to correctly decompose the goal? If a person wants something so much that he tries to pack it into a goal, then it means that he did not have it before. He had never achieved such a goal before. How does he structure an endpoint he hasn’t been to yet? Without training and experience, nothing will work. Therefore, the target picture is a bridge that helps to make the decomposition of dreams more natural and understandable.

The target picture can be obtained in several ways, described below. You can take a dream and describe it in as much detail as possible. Schematically draw on a sheet or in Miro. This is some kind of picture. Just throw out all your wishes in one place. Describe the ideal image of the future. Not just a general description of how you are doing well and have no worries, but describe it in as much detail as possible where you live, what people surround you, what you have, what you do and why. At the same time, everything needs to be verified at once with the questions «why» and «what for» to check that you are describing your desired life, and not ways to stand out from others. You can go from the opposite. Take all the undesirable phenomena, write why you don’t like them, and how it should be ideally. For example, I worked at a factory, in poor conditions, with a terrible schedule, without prospects and enthusiasm. I knew I didn’t want all this. I formulated such an idea for myself that «I want to work in IT, in the field of website development. In a young growing company with a flexible schedule and loyal management. I will have a great team where I will grow. Our projects will help people, win competitions and set the bar for quality in the industry. I will be appreciated, and my career will constantly go up.» I didn’t know the target picture as I wanted, but I knew exactly what I didn’t want and what it needed to be replaced with. Note that there is no specific city, deadline and details anywhere. These are all the same abstract wishlist, but with protrusions that you can cling to in order to start detailing. The purpose of the target picture is to take the first step from abstraction to concreteness. Get all the visible components of your dreams. This will make it easier to move on to the formation of goals. It is also an additional step to verify dreams. Do they correspond to your desires, and do you need it in general? It sometimes happens that the target picture raises so many questions to the dream that you wonder how this dream appeared in your thoughts? There are so many questions that we need to understand further. It is impossible to form a target picture correctly and incorrectly. Any attempt will already clarify the decomposition of your dreams, and it will be easier to set goals. If you can’t make progress in creating the target picture, then this is a wake-up call. How can you set goals, if even at the general level you have no idea what your dream consists of. Whatever goal setting template you are given, you simply won’t be able to write anything there. After all, this level is more detailed than the target picture. If the target picture is difficult, then make drafts, think about the dream, imagine the result, make several versions. Think about it, analyze why exactly this is what you want in this form. And after a few iterations, get your target picture. The main thing is to understand what and how it should be in the future so that you are satisfied. Our path is a route from the current situation to the goal. But the goal is not the end point. There are many of them. Goals are the results that need to be achieved in order for the target picture to be brought to life. The target picture will help you immediately approach planning intelligently and set goals in the right sequence.

Goal setting

After we have figured out where we want to move, the most interesting thing begins. We need to plan how we will do this and set goals correctly. As you may have noticed, for me the goal is the result that will lead me to the dream. That is, to the realization of my desires. I am not talking about the purpose of life, I do not consider the word «goal» as something global. A goal is a tool that allows you to capture the characteristics of a future version of my current situation in order to build a reversible plan to achieve it. For me, the desires themselves and the correct system of how to move towards them are more important. Goal setting is the next stage after the target picture, and it is not the last. Therefore, in this section we will not be preaching about how important the goal is, and say that an aimless life is bad. Many books have been written about this, research has been proven and tested in practice. It will only be about how to organize the goal-setting process so that it produces progress, not stress.

Now I am writing a book about my system and methods, but my relationship with goals has gone through all the typical stages from disappointment to admiration. They developed approximately according to this scenario:

1. Carefree childhood. I’m sitting on my parents’ neck, I’m studying at school and I don’t suspect what awaits me in the wonderful adult world;

2. Then the student years. I just live without thinking about the future. Only worry about being expelled from the university;

3. Graduation time is approaching. I promise my girlfriend a car and wait for the best employers to start fighting to invite me to work;

4. Welcome to adulthood. I understand what exactly Kurt Cobain meant to say.

«No one will die a virgin. Life will fuck everyone»

Kurt Cobain

They don’t give me an opportunity to work, I live in a dorm with cockroaches and I don’t know what to do. I work as a system administrator at a service station, then I connect the Internet to apartments, I begin to hate myself and this life. Not to mention the status of a babbler who promised a car and boasted that everything was under control. As a result, I get a job at the factory, and The Groundhog Day begins;

5. Work, home, work. Goals? What goals? No, I haven’t heard of them. Everything is done either by acquaintance, or by just getting lucky. I live, work, endure and blame everyone around me that everything is the way it is;

6. It seems that something needs to be done. I try to read books. They write about goals and success. But it’s easy to write in books, everything is different in life, so I call BS on your goals;

7. I watch the movie «The secret». Wow! You don’t have to do anything, just visualize the desires, and everything will work out. How stupid it is, I won’t do it;

8. I really want the changes to start by themselves. They say it is necessary to write down the annual goals on paper, burn, dissolve the ashes in a glass of champagne on New Year’s Eve and drink. Yes, I really did it. It didn’t work;

9. They say that it is necessary to write down annual goals on paper. Just do whatever you want, and it will come true. The power of writing by hand will work, and the result is in your pocket. I’ve been writing A4 sheets for a couple of years, nothing happens, I just write out of habit and I don’t believe in it myself;

10. I learn about the methods of setting goals. They advise setting goals according to SMART. So that everything is clear and detailed. So that even the salary should be specified, with a deadline and at the current price level. The goals have become longer, but still useless;

11. Disappointment. No matter how you write down these goals, nothing comes true, everything is useless. I have enough of deceiving myself and keeping my head in the clouds. I will write down real goals, simpler ones that I can really master in a year. As a result, they come true, but they are so small that they look more like tasks, not goals;

12. I’m moving to Moscow, life is getting more complicated. I find a job getting to which takes me about 3 hours. In the subway I start reading books about IT. It’s necessary to become a programmer;

13. I learn about Agile and the word «sprint». Let’s try to set goals for the quarter, not for the year;

14. Well will you look at that! It works better. People, look at how I set goals – I’m a genius! No, Semyon, you’re not a genius. In the book «Just Space» Katya Lengold has already written everything. If you don’t know about this book, then be sure to read and subscribe to Katya. Her book brought Agile approaches into people’s daily lives and shortened their path to the dream. Katya, respect. Keep doing what you’re doing!

15. I read all the books about time management that come across. I start to read books about the brain to avoid thinking traps and make quarterly goals clearer. I find out about the zone of the closest development of Lev Vygotsky. It turns out that you don’t need to strive to get out of your comfort zone, that’s the twist. It turns out that I drank ashes with champagne for nothing;

16. I read and experiment further. I get to the book «Essentialism. The Path to Simplicity» by Greg McKeon. It hits the head of time management with a stick. I understand that the main thing is not productivity, but selectivity. To have time to do more, you need to plan more. There is not enough time to do everything, there should be fewer goals, but they should be important;

17. I’m wrestling with the ways to give up the least important among all the important things. I read about Gestalt psychology and learn more about true desires. It is difficult, incomprehensible, but it seems that this is the only way to set priorities in life correctly;

18. At the time I observe goal-setting at work. Managers make mistakes in goal setting. I collect them, reflect, draw conclusions;

19. An interesting observation. When I decompose work on goals in my task tracker, I notice that sometimes I forget about the goal, but the things I do still lead to it. Then why do they write so much about goal-setting? In Ivan Zamesin’s blog, I read a review of the book «The Theory of Luck» by Scott Adams. There I get acquainted with the principle of «System against goals». This becomes a powerful upgrade of my goal-setting system and finally puts everything in its place. Of course, I also advise you to read the book;